Ten Across Conversations

About Ten Across Conversations

Ten Across Conversations examines pressing issues impacting communities along the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor. From Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, California, this region provides a compelling and comprehensive window into the major challenges and opportunities of the 21st century in their most extreme. Join founder and executive director, Wellington “Duke” Reiter, as he chats with subject experts bringing unique insights and new ways of thinking to reveal our collective capacity to create a more resilient future. For more information about the Ten Across Initiative visit www.10across.com (http://www.10across.com).

Publisher

Ten Across

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Aug 2021

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

136 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   What It Takes to Cool a City: Bill Updike on Smart Surfaces

   "…we can still get stuff done in this country when people's lives are on the line." —Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy & Programs, Smart Surfaces Coalition Cities are getting hotter, but some of the biggest opportunities to change that may be hiding in plain sight—in the roofs, roads and parking lots that surround us every day. Why it matters: Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S., according to a September 2025 GAO report (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107474). Dark roofs and pavement make it worse, soaking up the sun’s heat all day and releasing it at night. The question: The fixes are old and simple–cool roofs, lighter pavement, more shade. So why aren’t more cities using them? Why here: The I-10 corridor runs through some of the hottest cities in the country, and four of the Smart Surfaces Coalition's ten partner cities are on it: Phoenix, San Antonio, New Orleans and Jacksonville. Green building expert, Bill Updike, takes us inside an effort to rethink those surfaces. His organization, the Smart Surfaces Coalition, brings together more than forty organizations to help cities move from recognizing the problem to acting on it, with the maps, cost-benefit tools, and model policies to get there. But if the solutions are relatively straightforward, why aren’t more cities adopting them? Updike describes the less visible barriers standing in the way, the cities finding creative ways around them, and the political trend he now sees as the biggest risk to the whole effort. In this episode, Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy & Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition and formerly chief of green building and climate policy for Washington, DC, discusses what it takes to get a city to build differently. Relevant Articles and Resources REPORT: "Extreme Heat: Limited FEMA Assistance Highlights Need for Reevaluation of Agency's Role" (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107474) (Government Accountability Office, September 2025) "Phoenix has a new 5-year, $60M shade plan. Is it enough to cool down the city?" (https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2026-09-10/phoenix-has-a-new-5-year-60m-shade-plan-is-it-enough-to-cool-down-the-city) (KJZZ, September 2026) "US cities using smart surfaces, strategies to cool residents" (https://www.thenationshealth.org/content/55/8/5.1) (The Nation's Health, October 2025) Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Building Heat Resilience with Kathy Baughman McLeod & David Hondula (https://10across.org/building-heat-resilience-with-kathy-baughman-mcleod-david-hondula/) 10X Convergence: The Region's Experts Convene to Address the Insurability Crisis (https://10across.org/10x-convergence-the-regions-experts-convene-to-address-the-insurability-crisis/) Jeff Goodell on the Science and Accountability of Extreme Heat (https://10across.org/jeff-goodell-on-the-science-and-accountability-of-extreme-heat/) Credits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio Bill Updike is Director of U.S. Policy & Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition. He was previously a principal at the engineering firm Integral Group, where he developed climate action plans for cities and zero-carbon plans for colleges and...

2. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Every City Is Now El Paso: Jazmine Ulloa on a Border Built Brick by Brick

   "The foundation of the immigration system and the battles... all of that had been built brick by brick in El Paso, through both Republican and Democratic administrations." —Jazmine Ulloa Episode Description: To much of the country, Interstate 10 reaches El Paso on its way to somewhere else, the city seen as little more than a name on a sign between San Antonio and Phoenix, or as a backdrop for whatever border story dominates the news. Yet its position at a key gap in the mountains, El Paso del Norte, has anchored a pivotal crossroads for as long as people have traversed the continent. The city shares a binational life and generations of family ties with Ciudad Juárez, the older settlement on the southern bank of the Rio Grande. The two have been bound together since long before the U.S.-Mexico War placed an international boundary between them, a boundary whose precise course remained contested for decades. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, New York Times national reporter Jazmine Ulloa returns to her hometown to tell its story through the lives of five families across a century. In that time, El Paso has been a testbed and proving ground for U.S. border and immigration policy, and the lives of its residents chart the complicated motives, successes and failures, from the establishment of the Border Patrol in the 1920s to today's Department of Homeland Security. It is a history worth understanding now, as the biggest shifts in national immigration policy play out most pointedly along the I-10 corridor. The book was inspired by a tragedy. On August 3, 2019, a gunman drove to El Paso from the Dallas area and killed 23 people at a Walmart, and later admitted choosing a border city (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/texas-man-pleads-guilty-90-federal-hate-crimes-and-firearms-violations-august-2019-mass) to dissuade Hispanic immigration. Ulloa, then covering national politics for The Boston Globe, was on a plane home within a day. From the memorial that had sprung up in the Walmart parking lot, she could hear the traffic on the nearby Interstate 10. The sound that had once called her to leave became a reason to return, to understand the place she came from. In this episode, she joins Duke Reiter to discuss what she found, why she considers the comparison between El Paso and Ellis Island imperfect yet useful, and why the Ten Across region is such a revealing lens on immigration. This is where migration, enforcement and the question of who belongs are felt first and most intensely. What takes shape here tends to reach the rest of the country. As Ulloa argues, every city is now El Paso. Relevant Articles and Resources El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711804/el-paso-by-jazmine-ulloa/) REPORT: "Border Control: Revised Strategy Is Showing Some Positive Results" (https://www.gao.gov/products/ggd-95-30) "Jazmine Ulloa on 'El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory'" (https://www.publicbooks.org/jazmine-ulloa-on-el-paso-five-families-and-one-hundred-years-of-blood-migration-race-and-memory/) Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Kyle Paoletta on American Oasis and the Southwest's Claim on the American Story (https://10across.org/why-the-southwest-is-already-the-american-future-with-kyle-paoletta/) <a href="https://10across.org/part-four-two-texas-cities-that-are-reexamining-data-center-deals/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer...

3. 

   10 Sept 2026

   Jeff Goodell on the Science and Accountability of Extreme Heat

   "This is really a story about... the people who are causing the pollution, harming the people who basically did nothing and are suffering the damages. And do those people who cause the harm owe the people who suffer the damages anything?" —Jeff Goodell, contributing writer at Rolling Stone and author of The Heat Will Kill You First July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, and Europe came through its hottest June-to-July period on record. At least 35,000 excess deaths have been counted across the continent's summer heatwaves (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/25/at-least-35000-excess-deaths-europe-back-to-back-heatwaves) — a figure produced by statistical modeling rather than by death certificates, and one that is still incomplete. Here in the Ten Across region, where extreme heat is not new, Maricopa County confirmed 645 heat deaths in 2023 (https://www.maricopa.gov/1858/Heat-Surveillance) and counts them one by one. A September 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107474) describes extreme heat as the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Heat has nonetheless never once been the basis of a federal disaster declaration, because federal assistance is largely built around damage to physical infrastructure, while extreme heat mainly damages people. Mayors from this corridor, who have been managing heat longer than anyone, have been pressing to change that. Meanwhile there is still no federal heat standard protecting outdoor workers, and Texas and Florida — among the hottest states in the country — have passed laws barring their own cities from requiring employers to provide water breaks and shade. The heat is also moving. In June 2021 a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, a region built for nothing like it. Among the hundreds who died was Sebastian Perez, a 38-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, two months into a job at an Oregon nursery. Within two weeks, scientists at World Weather Attribution announced the event would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/). In the five years since, the field has advanced to counting the deaths a heat wave would not otherwise have caused, and to tracing heat damage to the emissions of individual companies (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3). That science now underpins lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, new laws in Vermont and New York, and a fight over the climate chapter in the reference manual federal judges consult (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/national-academy-of-sciences-pulls-climate-chapter-from-judges-manual/). In this episode, climate journalist Jeff Goodell returns to the podcast to discuss the summer behind us, the divide he has described between "the cooled and the cooked," and his current project on the rise of attribution science. Relevant Articles and Resources "Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation" (https://10across.org/framework-for-a-heat-ready-nation/) (Federation of American Scientists &amp; Ten Across, July 2025) "The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs. the Cooked" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/opinion/extreme-heat-class-divide.html) (The New York Times, August 2025) <a href="https://climate.copernicus.eu/"...

Who has been a guest on Ten Across Conversations

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Dr Amy McGovern
• Devney Majerle
• Satish Tripathi
• Jeffrey Carney
• Dr Samantha Montano

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 52 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

75

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

71

Contact Ten Across Conversations

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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